The Bucket Orchid

Coryanthes macrantha

It fills a bucket with its own fluid and drops the bee in.

Book: Edwards’s Botanical Register
Plate: Pl. 1841
Artist: for John Lindley, Edwards’s Botanical Register
Date: 1836
Held by: Wikimedia Commons

Pl. 1841Coryanthes macrantha

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore, down to the stipple.

Size

$29.00

The story

The most elaborate pollination mechanism in the plant kingdom. Two glands drip fluid into a bucket formed by the lip; a male orchid bee, collecting scent from the rim, slips in, and the only exit is a narrow tunnel that clamps him for several minutes while the pollen is glued on. He then does it again at the next flower. Darwin read the accounts and could hardly believe them. The flower does not attract the bee. It processes him.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

The Bucket Orchid printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

About this reproduction

A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate held by Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright (1836).
Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years (inscribed pieces and atelier bouquets are set by hand and printed to order).
Colour-managed to the source scan: the hand-colour is the colourist’s, not ours. We correct nothing and invent nothing.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the stipple that makes a petal look soft, the wash of the hand-colourist, the veins of the leaf — on stock made to outlive its owner. A poster reproduces the picture. This reproduces the plate.

From the same hand